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Sunny's is a steakhouse that opened in Miami 2024. After its celebrated pop-up, now we're full steam ahead, booked out almost every night of the week. On a busy night, we're hitting 5 600 plus covers. Hangar Stakes, one of our bests sellers. Sometimes we sell up to 100 of those a night. 2,000 oysters we're selling. Parker House rolls, 350 orders of two. Anyotti I think the record sits at 115 orders. When the individual prep day team is coming in at around 5:00 a.m. They've got to be knocking out 20 to 30 tasks big and small every single day to be a restaurant of this size and do the volume that we do at the quality we do. You've got to make it fun that will flow into our guest experience and
really show people that hospitality that Sunny's is known for. Morning, guys. How are you? I'm Aaron Brooks, executive chef here at Sunny Steakhouse in Miami. It's 8:00 a.m. Our prep team's already been in there for a few hours. Let's get inside and get the day started. So, Sunny's originally started as a pop-up in the location we are now during the pandemic. The team then dining room tables around a makeshift grill in the corner over there. Charring Wagu steaks and dry edge prime steaks for the guests. When it came about, this was going to be a fullyfledged restaurant after the pop-up. Definitely sparked my interest and this is why we're here now. So, as you can see the window here, looking into the kitchen. Everyone's
coming in. They're getting ready. It's time to get inside and let's start our prep day for service. So, right now we're in our butcher room. It's a refrigerated butcher chamber. We have two full-time butchers working here every day. We also have a dry age cooler behind you there where the meat dry age and we store all of our sub primals. We make sausages in here. Tin debone chickens and deboned duck legs. We're at a point in our day now where it's time to get into a lot of butchery. But the first thing we're going to do is get into our dry age exports. We dry age inhouse 35 to 45 days on an export. So
an export is a bone in ribeye. All right, that's what we've got here. This one's been sitting around for about 40 days. Starting to get a nice little bit of mold on it there. A little bit of bark on it. A little bit crunchy on the outside. That's going to give it this beautiful, beautiful nutty flavor. So, this is our band saw name. So, for the band blade that's on it. All right. Spin super, super fast, and it's going to cut through all these bones. So, we've taken that first outside piece off. That's that crunchy barky stuff there that we want to get rid of, the mold. We'll take that off. And then next, we'll get in there. We'll cut our first steak off here.
This is USDA prime black Angus beef from the Midwest. We cut them about 30 oz. Our serving portion is 26, but we're going to trim it down. What we have here is what we call a bone scraper. This is going to take any merely bone pieces that got shredded by the band saw. It's going to take that off cuz it's not really fit for consumption there. So, we're going to scrape that all off till we see the nice color of the meat there. And then jumping in here, it's time to trim it up. So, first I'll take a portion of this fat off here. And then just going around the outside, trimming ever so lightly without taking too much of the meat off, but removing that harder bark that's on the outside. All
done. All right. This has got to be my happiest place in the restaurant. I'm inside the dry age room. Here at Sunny's, we're really blessed to be have a facility that enables to dry age your own beef. Not a lot of steakouses have that blessing, but having it in house for us and being in control of ourselves and maybe bring in different cuts or something special to try something new, we really have a great privilege to be able to do that. This is the shelf where we age the exports. This one's been on the shelf about 10 days now. So, here's where we segue all the cuts for tonight. All right, these have been portioned and ready to go for this evening. You see here we've got our dry-aged ribe eyes with the bone in
nicely trimmed on the outside. Here we've got some beautiful Aussie lambax ready to go. The American Wagu. Look at the marbling. Fine grain marbling from the purebred Wagu. So here we have our dry-aged duck breast. These ducks are from Hudson Valley. They're absolute beauties. We get them in hole, remove the legs. We use the legs for ragu. We also use it for terrain. And then we dry age the breast on the cage. These age for about 10 days. So here I'm going to be making some sausage here at Sunny's. We make all the shakureri in house. We have bacon. We have a cheesy sausage stuffed with a compe.
Whenever we came up with a dish, we broke it down and said, you know, whatever we put on the plate in that dish, it's going to be made here. So if we talked about putting a sausage on the menu, the meat was going to be ground in house, stuffed in house, smoked in house, grilled over charcoal, and served to, I guess. So here what we've done is we've ground some Birkshshire pork with a little bit of our dry-aged fat as well from our dry-aged prime exports. Seasoned with a bunch of spices, some chili, there's some pio pepper in there as well, a touch of white wine, and now we're stuffing it into a pork casing.
We'll tie these into about 4in links and then we'll run it as a special on the menu this evening. Growing up, my father used to take me down to the butcher shop and we'd have a bit of yarn with the butcher, a bit of a chat, you know, and talk about what's in the case and what's been fresh that day, what's really special. So when I get to come in here and work with the team, it does take me back to the conversations I used to have. Had a work experience at a butcher. And I think maybe that's where I got some of this passion for uh making some of these crafted meat, so to speak. If you just tie the end to stop the stuffing from coming out. Sometimes you'll get some air bubbles in there. So
you're going to prick these holes in here. And then we're going to flip her over again. Just getting some of those air pockets out so when we twist, our casings don't burst. or at least we hope they don't. Okay, so pinching and twisting. We're going to leave these to dry a little bit. It'll enable us when we grill them to get the skin nice and crispy. We're going to go outside and check out how the guys are doing on the bread. So, what's a good meal without some really great bread? Here at Sunny's, we make our Parker House rolls. These are one of our signatures. Everyone loves them. Here we have the team rolling out the Parkers. These have been mixed. A little bit of a table rest here for about 20 minutes to proof
lightly. Now we're going to weigh them, ball them up, proof them again, and then they'll go in the oven. It's a yeast dough that's been enriched with a bunch of eggs and a ton of butter. It's super light and super fluffy. We based it with an egg wash before we bake it as well and top it with molden salt and poppy seeds. That crunch of that saltiness on the molden salt as you chomp into this like beautiful luscious bun. It's pretty awesome. We serve with Vermont butter doused in honey as well. Warm on some soft butter with the honey. Heaven. Each day we make about 700 750 of these and we're almost sold out every day. Okay, so this mixer here, we're making the dough about three times. So we'll make a batch, take it out. As we're resting that first batch, we're
making another one. So these are our rolls from earlier that you saw on the table. The big ball of dough and now the egg wash, molden salt, and finished with the poppy seeds before baking. So here we have the Parker House rolls that have gone into the oven. These will be baked for about 16 minutes. So a scoop of ice just like this goes in with the Parker House as they're placed in the oven to bake. It raises the humidity in there, the steam. This helps with the rise, helps with the crust. So look at these. Absolutely perfect. They got the perfect proof, the perfect rise, and then baked at 375° enabling them to rise here level with the top. These look stunning. Okay, now
that our Parker House rolls are looking great, we'll get those other batches in the oven. It's time to move on, get some more prep done. So, each day the team spends about 3 to four hours on just making pasta. We have five different shapes on the menu. So, here's our sweet corn anulotti. Small little pillows of pasta stuffed with the cornfast are nice and sweet, nice and silky. This will be blanched to order and then tossed through a butter sauce, Monte Burr with a pepper oil for its rich nuttiness, a little bit of spice in there, blue crab, and it's finished with a squeeze of lime. We plate that with a ton of chives on top.
Listen, this is a day one dish. People come from all around for this every day, you know, anywhere from 1,200 to 1,800 annual 15 piece to an order. 100 orders a day. Do the math. It's a lot of pasta. It takes a lot of focus and a lot of passion for this. The process of making the filling itself is a feat and takes a lot of time. Sweet corn slowcooked with shallots, white wine, lots of butter passing through a fine shininoa, pushing every piece through. So the texture is super smooth. Piped in, folded over and cut. All pastas that we have on the menu stand alone is really great dishes. Noki, other extruded pastas, Campanelli, different brazes, different vegetarian options in the pastas as
well. Listen, we're a sunny steakhouse. We're a steakhouse at heart, but in between a lot of dishes that really tie into the culture, which is Miami, the excitement, the fun, which really makes Miami special. I think you really feel that in the room, in the service, and in the food. So, where we are right now is we're at our pass, our expo stations. We have a number of expos here. The amount of meals that goes across this line is pretty extraordinary. We have about 100 plus people on the team here. Although we're only open for dinner, the team is coming in as early as 5:00 a.m. We've got product coming in all day here. Meats, seafoods, produce, dry goods, taking that product in and then putting on the shelves. 5:30 we open the doors
and that's when dinner service starts. That's when the masses are coming in to experience what we do. Service is non-stop all the way until midnight. We're a tough reservation to get, so to speak. 500 plus 600 plus covers every single night between terrace and dining room. And then in the background, this kitchen lit up and firing on all cylinders. That's the magic of this place. So, a lot of our plates, we call them treasures. We have some really, really beautiful china that we've got from some great vendors, but a lot of our stuff, it's antiques. It's oneoffs.
It's special little pieces that we serve some of our dishes in that make it unique for our guests. Who doesn't want a pelican with French fries coming out of the mouth of it? The look of that, the feeling that you get when you see, wow, I've got something that nobody else has in this room. My queen of mans come on an octopus for God's sake. Look at this thing. You know, four queen of mans there come to the table. A real sight to see. This is what makes a lot of the vessels that we use here at Sunny special and make our guests feel special because you're getting something unique and not what everyone has. And we'll be in the middle of service and you'll hear someone shout out, "Hey, I need the
Pelican." Or, "Hey, I need the lunchbox." And it's a special vessel that they're a fan of that they want to use for certain dishes. how they present and uh how they make it unique for our guests. So, one of the things that we're really really known for here at Sunny's is our Queen Aman ice cream sandwich. These are our queens here. Queen has portioned them. She's folded them up. Each one lined with sugar. The dough itself is a laminated Danish dough, so it does have yeast in it. It's been laminated with layers of some of the best butter we can get. The dough is rolled out into large sheets. It's cut
into squares that are about 2 in by 2 in. Folded in, pressed in like these beautiful little almost like tul shaped pastries in there. And that keeps the lightness on the outside. So when it bakes, it does proof up and create those air pockets in there that creates the layers that really make the lightness and the crispiness. And then we're going to proof it. Popped in the oven here to proof for about 20 minutes. When it's the right size, that's when we take them out. We'll turn that oven up and we'll bake them really, really hard and fast to get that sugar caramelizing on the outside. That bubbling is the butter and also the sugar. And as that butter cooks down and the sugar caramelizes, that's when you
get that glassy caramel around the outside of the Queen of Man. It's one of the signature moves on a queen. You've got to have that caramelized sugar on the outside. Sort of a glassy almost. These queens, we make roughly 200 a day. And it's a laborous process. You really have to know what you're doing. If your butter gets too warm, it's going to split inside the layers of pastry. It's not going to bake up. you're not going to get that beautiful lightness that you're looking for. There is a really a lot of love that's put into these things. So, here we have our ice cream machine.
This is where Quinny's churned our ice cream. Churning, the process of pouring the custard in or the onlaze, milk, cream, sugar, egg yolks, and lots of vanilla beans cooked until perfectly set. Poured into our ice cream machine. So, we get this beautiful, beautiful scoop of ice cream. It's not too hard and not too soft. When you crunch into that queen, it doesn't ooze out the side, but it has that texture as well that just gels so perfectly with that crunchy pastry. Now, here's our queens. They are all done. Look at these things. Absolutely amazing. That's what I'm talking about. See that glossy caramel on the outside? And if you can hear that, the that crunch and look how flaky it is
here, mate. You got to try that. Okay. What do you reckon? Wow. About crunchy. How light it is? Is it soft? Yeah. The only thing it's missing is some ice cream. It's amazing. So, here we're all set now. We've got our Queen of Man's baked. It's time to get these cooled down, wrapped up nice and tight, so that humidity doesn't kill that caramelly, glassy, crunchy outside texture. All right, it's 2:00 in the afternoon and we've just got our seafood delivery. Ian's going to process some fish here. We've got some beautiful Hiramasa from New Zealand. What he's going to do is some sukie beaki. And this is for our
Hiramasa crudeo. He's just using his knife on a particular angle to almost scoop underneath the scales without cutting into the flesh. It's super important. It's not only the skill of the cutter, but also the quality of the knife. You've got to have an extremely sharp blade. When it's that sharp as well, pivot on the wrong angle and then you're into the flesh and then that can shorten the shelf life of the fish. We get a hole because it'll always be fresher because you can see the fish hole. You can examine it. You can look for the signs, how firm the flesh is, if the eyes are cloudy, the smell of it, check the gills, how red they are. You know, when you buy portions, you don't know how long it's been sitting in ice
or sitting in a styrofoam container. This, we can check it and make sure that it's up to standard for what we want to serve. So, the next step, Ian will remove the head here. What he's doing now is he's cleaning out the blood line that runs along the inside of the belly, inside of the spine there. Cleaning all that out as well, cuz that can send the fish bad pretty quickly. A lot of the things that we do here for some cooks might be something that they learn in a module at culinary school for an hour or two or a day, but will they use those skills when they go into the industry? You know, there's a lot of
places that don't have the means or the availability to do it. So, here we try to always push ourselves to make sure that we're doing that so people have that opportunity to not only just do it once, but over and over again to build their skill set through repetition. The simplicity in it, you know, some people might look at it as just it's a few slices of fish with some salsa on top, but at the end of the day, the care and love that has gone into it, not only through sourcing, but also processing, in my mind, is pretty impressive from start to finish. So, now Ian's placed the hook on it, and that will hang just like that in our dry edger. Hold it still. And I move stuff so quickly, too. So today we received the whole blue fin
tuna. This is coming from Mexico. Ian's about to break it down into separate cuts. He's going to take top loin off it, bottom loin. We're also going to have some belly pieces and he's going to take the collar off too. All these different areas of the tuna have different quantities of fat within the muscle structure. So we'll use them for different applications as well. Some of them are great for tatar. We do a beautiful Sicilian sashimi we call it. You'll get the ottoro which is the fatty belly, chutro which has a higher concentration of fat and then the akami which is the lean.
You can see the gradient there. Lighter being fattier and then going into the very lean up here around the bloodline there. Belly and loin. This is the belly with that beautiful fat in there and then heading up to more of the leaner area here. You could hang it just like this and then take loins off as you need it. But these pieces, if they're not used tonight, they'll be used tomorrow for service. All right, we'll let Ian finish up here with the tuna. That'll go into our dry Asia, what needs to be portioned tonight for service. We're going to wrap up here and get ready for service.
It's 3:00 p.m. Every day we put up family meal. It's time for folks to start coming in for their shift or for wrapping up for their day. They'll grab a bite. They'll sit down. They'll talk about what's happening for tomorrow or talk about what's going to happen for tonight. But it's a very important time for us for everyone to get together and just to enjoy a bite before service. Then we'll roll into the front of house pre-shift. A time for us all to get together to talk about specials for the evening. PXs, what we're featuring for our butchers cuts. Then it's bang straight into service.
Leading into specials, your butcher cuts for this evening. We have one. We're going to be doing Wagu KC's bonein KC strips. 20 oz. They are $160. I have six of those. Tonight we have a Sicilian tuna sashimi. Okay, so we're back to tuna only on the sashimi. We got a massive bluefin tuna from Mexico just broken down today. It'll have the three cuts of tuna in it. It is summer. It's still hot. The waters are hot, so the tuna isn't as fatty as it has been, but it's still delicious nonetheless. We'll do that for 24. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you so much. I'm back. Ribey, asparagus. Ribey You want to take that up to club soda for me?
Fire four east. Come on. Let's get a Yes, chef for the cameras, guys. All right, guys. Thanks for joining us. It's time to rock on and get ready for service. We got about 500 on the books tonight, so it's going to be a banger. Real quick, what time is it? It's 5:00. I do it again.
